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View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoDispatch illustrationOctogenarians like Ralph Nader and Jimmy Carter are being joined by younger Americans in their use of typewriters instead of computers.

By Maria RecioMcClatchy Newspapers • Monday April 28, 2014 1:29 AM

WASHINGTON — Ralph Nader looks like the original geek.

Intense, driven, focused on detail, slightly disheveled, the consumer advocate and former
presidential candidate has a large electronic footprint on the Internet and social media.

But it turns out that Nader, who just turned 80, is so last century — maybe so last two
centuries.

His latest book,
Unstoppable, will soon be out, and like his previous 11, it was typed on a bulky manual
typewriter. He doesn’t have a cellphone — “Why should I have a cellphone? I have people I don’t
want to get phone calls from” — and his Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and email accounts are written
by aides, under strict guidelines. “I’ve never seen them,” he said of his virtual accounts.

Nader is part of a small group of Americans who are digitally resistant. They avoid electronic
communication — from computers to smartphones — as much as possible, even as the world goes
digital.

But there’s another emerging group that’s also turning to old technology: tech users distrustful
of the breadth of electronic surveillance revealed by former National Security Agency contractor
Edward Snowden.

“I don’t go near the stuff,” Nader said of digital communication. “It’s like liquor. I don’t
want to lose control of my time.”

Former President Jimmy Carter is turning out to be a digital teetotaler, too, but for different
reasons. He created a stir last month on NBC’s
Meet the Press when he said, “I have felt that my own communications were probably
monitored, and when I want to communicate with a foreign leader privately, I type or write the
letter myself, put it in the post office and mail it.”

Although at 89, Carter is older than Nader, he’s been a fan of digital media — until now. What
is being called “the Snowden effect” has people securing their communications.

“After Snowden, how comfortable can anyone be putting their personal or professional life
online, or even on their own computer?” said Warren Sack, a software designer and media theorist
who is a professor in the film and digital-media department at the University of California-Santa
Cruz.

In a poll last month marking the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web, the Pew Research Center
found that 81 percent of U.S. adults use laptop and desktop computers at home, work, school or
someplace else. The poll, taken in January, also found that 90 percent of U.S. adults have
cellphones, of which 58 percent are smartphones. In the 18-29 age group, 98 percent have
cellphones, 83 percent of which are smartphones.

Jeff Hendrie, an 18-year-old high-school senior in metropolitan Detroit, is something of an
anomaly. He lugs a typewriter to school every day and does just about everything the old-fashioned
way. Before he typed, he wrote his papers in longhand. He uses a flip phone and considers the U.S.
mail “the most-secure system.” He has an email account, out of necessity, but he isn’t on social
media, and teachers who usually send students their assignments by text will give them to him in
person instead.

“Pretty much everyone, including myself and my parents, say I was born in the wrong era,”
Hendrie said.

Lynne Joyrich is a professor of modern culture and media at Brown University, but she has a
fondness for mid-20th-century devices such as rotary phones.

She has a smartphone to keep in touch with students but often forgets she has it, “for the
pleasure of being able to be left alone.” And that ability to control who you have contact with
matters more and more.

“In today’s world, there is more — and at the same time, less — comfort with surveillance and
people being aware of what you’re doing,” she said.